The Weekend Read - Issue #29 - Viewstamped Replication Revisited
Another weekend, another weekend read, this time all about Viewstamped Replication Revisited
In their paper Viewstamped Replication Revisited, Barbara Liskov and James Cowling present the Viewstamped Replication Protocol.
The Viewstamped Replication Protocol is consensus and state machine replication protocol that predates Raft and predates Paxos!
Consensus and state machine replication must guarantee consistency and shall guarantee availability, so they must guarantee safety and shall guarantee liveness.
The Viewstamped Replication Protocol can be divided into three sub-protocols, the normal protocol, view change protocol, and recovery protocol.
Roughly speaking the normal protocol contributes to meeting consistency requirements whereas the view change protocol and recovery protocol contribute to availability requirements.
Consensus and state machine replication are as essential to distributed systems as they are difficult to grok οΌ this paper is a clear and elegant discussion that without a doubt will deepen your understanding.
Happy Reading
Viewstamped Replication Revisited
This paper presents an updated version of Viewstamped Replication, a replication technique that handles failures in which nodes crash. It describes how client requests are handled, how the group reorganizes when a replica fails, and how a failed replica is able to rejoin the group.
For anybody who is interested in a review of the paper, I highly recommend Joran Dirk Greef's session in the DistSys Reading Group οΌ Best summarized by Michael Gash :)
Viewstamped Replication Revisited β www.youtube.com
In the 74th meeting we discussed yet another foundational paper, Viewstamped Replication.